Everywhere You Don't Belong - Paperback

by Gabriel Bump (Author)

"A comically dark coming-of-age story" (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review) about a young black man growing up on Chicago's South Side, this visceral, vivid, and urgent novel follows him on his journey towards acceptance, safety, and success.​

In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn't dangerous or brilliant--he's an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home.

Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America.

Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don't Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020

Winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence

Author Biography

Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His debut novel, Everywhere You Don't Belong, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award. His second novel, The New Naturals, was a Washington Post, Boston Globe, and New York Times Notable Book of 2023. Bump's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers.